Fellowship Class

Tarrytown United Methodist Church

May 18, 1997

Wayne Danielson

Upside Down

Has your world ever turned upside down?

Maybe not.  It doesn’t happen often.  Usually things just go on  more or less the way they always have.  But once in a while something happens.  And, all at once, things are different.  And they’ll never be quite the same again.

UT regent Lowell Leberman had something like that happen to him.  One day he stepped off a curb and his eyesight was gone.  Just like that.  He never got it back.  His life was changed from that moment.

My friend and fellow teacher at UT Martin Todaro lost the hearing in one ear the same way.  One Sunday afternoon the hearing in his left ear  just went away. Completely.  He never got it back. His life was changed from that moment.

Not all changes are sad ones.  A  few years ago, as I was getting my coat to leave a party, I saw standing next to me a woman I had been noticing all evening.  She was vivacious, beautiful, funny.  On the spur of the moment, I asked her if she would like to take a drive in the country the next day to look at the wild flowers.  I had no idea what her reply would be, and , to tell the truth,  I was prepared to hear a polite excuse, and that would have been the end of that. There was a noticeable pause as she thought it over.  “Okay,” she said with a smile.  And that one word eventually turned a sad and dull  life into a happy  and exciting one.  It does happen, doesn’t it?